If your menu loops back to a point before the buttons have appeared, the user will momentarily see the highlight without the corresponding button. This is because the loop point is the place at which the player will start displaying the button highlight. I also need to ensure that all of the buttons have appeared before the loop point. If you’re using music, don’t start it immediately at the loop point as many players take a fraction of a second to kick in the audio after they loop. an air conditioning hum – that will not jump unpleasantly when the menu loops. You’ll notice that my menu’s audio track has a beat or two of silence around the loop point. I need to make sure that the loop point is at a place in the video where the audio track is silent or at least is playing a constant background noise – e.g. I can also set the loop point in the same panel. In Encore I can now create a new menu and use the pick-whip in the properties panel to select my Quicktime file as the source for both the video and the audio.
The buttons were created in Photoshop and added to the movie in Final Cut, before exporting as a ProRes Quicktime (with these buttons now baked in) ready to be imported into Encore. The following video shows my edited background movie. It’s important to think about where your loop point is going to be so that the menu will loop smoothly. The first step for me was shooting and editing the background movie, although for most people this will be a computer-generated graphic rather than something shot with a camera. So, now you appreciate all of the above you can get started on your menu. Stop/Eject’s main menu with all the button highlights visible They could not be red-and-white striped rings, like life preservers they can only be one solid colour. The button highlights are the white rings. So look at the Stop/Eject main menu below.
I prefer to build my buttons into the background movie in my editing software (Final Cut) rather than add them in Encore, and that’s the approach I’ll outline here.Īnother crucial point to understand is that each button highlight can only be one colour. All the disc player can deal with is a background movie and the highlights. Yes, you can import your background movie as a Quicktime into Encore and then add buttons to it within Encore, but when you come to build your disc the software will render those buttons into the background movie. but what about the buttons themselves? These have to be part of the background. Hang on – background, button hightlights…. The user will only ever see one of these at a time.
They’re not like websites or Flash movies where you can do anything you want the specifications are quite narrow. I’m going to assume you already know the basics of Encore and can find your way around Photoshop.įirst of all you have to understand how DVDs and Blu-rays (henceforth collectively referred to simply as “discs”) work.
I’ll use Stop/Eject‘s main menu as the example.
If, like me, you want to do it all from scratch rather than using any of the built-in templates, the process isn’t particularly intuitive, and was sufficiently different from DVD Studio Pro (the software I’m used to) to leave me scratching my head from time to time, but here’s how I did it in the end. Today I thought I’d share the process I figured out for creating looping menus in Encore for DVD and Blu-ray.